Opinion Brief: Friday, June 12, 2015

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by HealthCareCAN and the Canadian College of Health Leaders. On June 15-16, over 700 healthcare leaders will gather in PEI, the largest annual gathering of health leaders, to debate motions on some of Canada’s most pressing healthcare concerns. Register here.

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Good evening, subscribers. The New Democrats continue to amaze — and tonight, for the first time, we have clear evidence that the terror file may be providing much of the wind in their sails.

The latest EKOS poll shows the NDP has crept up to 33.6 per cent support nationally, against 26.9 per cent for the Conservatives and 23.3 per cent for the Liberals. They’re getting much of that bounce from the backlash against the Harper government’s deeply controversial security bill, C-51 — which the Liberals opted to support, but which a clear majority of voters now reject. “C-51 is a ballot issue,” writes pollster Frank Graves. “Awareness of the bill is very high by the standards of this scale, and has grown somewhat over the past few months. So it has the political salience to be a game-changer.”

It’s a great poll for the New Democrats, but it still doesn’t put them in majority territory. Which is why you really need to read Christopher Waddell’s intriguing what-if exploration of how the immediate aftermath of the election might play out; if nobody wins a majority, somebody’s going to have to make a deal. “Forget about what the party leaders are saying, or not saying, about coalition government. Instead, look closely at their platforms and see where there is common ground.”

No matter how many times Stephen Harper sticks a finger in Vladimir Putin’s eye, the Russian president still won’t treat the prime minister as a primary antagonist. It’s a different story with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, whose recent statements on Ukraine inspired expressions of outrage from Moscow. The reason: Putin sees Japan as a potential military threat. Canada? Not so much. “There was alarm in Moscow in April when a new U.S.-Japan defence agreement was announced. The Russians quickly envisaged a re-emergence of U.S. plans for ballistic missile defence — known colloquially as ‘Star Wars’ when first imagined by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.”

But even if the Russians don’t want to invite us to their new Cold War, we can take comfort in demographics. Bloomberg’s Noah Smith says Canada’s stable state institutions and economically-oriented immigration policy put us in the pole position to be the superpower of the next century. “In terms of an educated, high-skilled population, Canada may soon become pre-eminent. That could turn Canada into a global Silicon Valley or Singapore, but with lower inequality. It could be for the 22nd century what the Netherlands was for the 17th.”